Member Articles

Enjoy our extensive collection of member-contributed articles to learn how other Scrum practitioners use Scrum in the workplace.

Read about the experiences and ideas of Agile colleagues around the world, and share your own thoughts here. You can also visit Spotlight, which features blogs by experts in the fields of Scrum, Agile, and the broader business world.

Opinions represent those of the authors and not of Scrum Alliance. The sharing of member-contributed content on this site does not imply endorsement of specific Scrum methods or practices beyond those taught by Scrum Alliance Certified Trainers and Coaches.

During my experiences as a ScrumMaster and consultant, Agile values, such as transparency and adaptation, were my pillars in grounding teams. However, I believe these values cannot thrive without one other value: empathy.

The goal of any Agile team is to deliver great code as efficiently as possible. Therefore, to create a high-functioning Scrum team, the first step is to ensure that each team member's well-being is met.

When a team isn't able to work together closely and effectively, I have found that a "Collaboration Retrospective" can help remove obstacles, eliminate misunderstandings, bring people together, and help them find their own solutions.

I recently worked with teams who had all received at least basic Agile training. However, once they started working on sprints, I found that they were more concerned about application life cycle management (ALM) tools than about following Agile methods.